Transferring from one Laptop to another laptop. Hard drive splits between recognized as a E and D drive

[jarreds63171328]

Hey Everyone,

I recently got a new laptop to upgrade from my older one. Before I had switched over to this new laptop, I began to operate with my photos located on my external hard drive. On my older laptop my hard drive was recognized as Seagate (E). but when I had switched to my newer laptop that had changed to Seagate (D).

I had not recognized the change but now my catalog is stuck between Lightroom recognizing some photos as it would the (E) Drive and other on (D). Is there a way to get all the photos recognized again under the same pathway so that I dont have a split catalog?

I have already switched the pathway of my hard drive to recognize the other "pathway" D or E, but that just results in the opposite letter Drive becoming smart previews without a location of files.

[richardplondon]

I strongly recommend hard-assigning a fixed drive letter for your Seagate that is much further through the alphabet. That's because LR's paths depend on this drive never coming into competition, for a soft-assigned drive letter, with some other device which may already be connected too, on a given occasion.

If you assign (say) M, then that's well out of the way of something else accidentally grabbing D, or E, etc. This will temporarily 'orphan' all of your photos (which is fine).

Once you've done this, you can suitably re-browse the common parent folder of all the images that LR is currently showing within D - to the corresponding folder within (say) M. Then do the same thing for the images that LR is currently showing within E.

If that common parent folder is not showing, right-click on one of the top level folders that are showing, and select "show parent folder".

IMPORTANT: do not even consider re-importing anything. You only need to update the addressing (path info) for the images that are already imported, complete with all edits and organisation as they stand.

[jarreds63171328]

That works for one of the drives, reassigning the parents folder. But the other one shows up with this error

[richardplondon]

What happens if you re-path just one image that is marked as missing? (click on the [!] icon and choose Locate)